Sandy Phillips who lost her 24-year old daughter Jessica during Aurora move theater shooting, hugs Richard Martinez, father of Christopher Michaels-Martinez, 20, who was killed in the UC Santa Barbara shooting incident, as her husband Lonnie holds a photo of their daughter, during a press conference on gun violence and urging the Senate to take up gun control legislation held by the Everytown for Gun Safety group, in Washington, D.C. on June 17, 2014. UPI/Kevin Dietsch

The University of California, Santa Barbara, commonly known as UCSB or UC Santa Barbara, is a public research university and one of the 10 general campuses of the University of California system. The main campus is located on a 1,022-acre (4.1 km2) site in Santa Barbara, California, 100 miles (160 km) northwest of Los Angeles. Founded in 1891 as an independent teachers' college, UCSB joined the University of California system in 1944 and is the third-oldest general-education campus in the system.

UCSB is a comprehensive doctoral university and is organized into five colleges offering 87 undergraduate degrees and 55 graduate degrees. The campus is the 5th-largest in the UC system by enrollment with 19,800 undergraduate and 3,050 graduate students. The university granted 5,442 bachelor's, 576 master's, and 310 Ph.D. degrees in 2006–2007. The four-year, full-time undergraduate program is classified by the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education as "more selective, higher transfer-in". In 2010, UCSB was ranked 39th among "National Universities" by U.S. News & World Report, 29th worldwide by the Times Higher Education World University Rankings and 32nd worldwide by the Academic Ranking of World Universities.

UC Santa Barbara is a "very high activity" research university and spent $191.2 million on research expenditures in the 2007 fiscal year, 97th-largest in the United States. UCSB houses twelve national research centers, including the renowned Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics. UCSB faculty includes five Nobel Prize laureates, one Fields Medalist, 29 members of the National Academy of Sciences, 27 members of the National Academy of Engineering, and 23 members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. UCSB was elected to the Association of American Universities in 1995. UCSB was the #3 host on the ARPAnet.

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